Bill Allowing IRS To Revoke Passports Described as “Stalinist”

by Paul Joseph Watson, Faith Issues

The ‘Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act’ (MAP-21) is so crammed full of unconstitutional provisions that even the mainstream media is up in arms, with an Investors Business Daily editorial describing the section that allows the IRS to revoke passports of accused tax delinquents as “Stalinist”.

As we reported earlier this week, Senate Bill 1813 would empower the Internal Revenue Service to bar Americans from leaving the country if they are merely accused of owing $50,000 or more in back taxes.

Despite numerous Supeme Court cases and the Constitution itself, namely Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 , which forbids “Bills of Attainder,” arguing against the provision’s legality, the Republican-controlled House is expected to pass the bill in its entirety without much fanfare.

However, a maelstrom of dissent appears to be brewing, even amongst mainstream media columnists including the Investor’s Business Daily, a prominent national newspaper published in Los Angeles.

In an editorial entitled IRS Might Have Stalinist Powers Under New Law, IBD remarks, “It is hard to imagine any law more reminiscent of the Soviet Union that America toppled, or its Eastern Bloc slave satellites.”

The editorial compares the notion of empowering the IRS with such authority as a new kind of unseen Berlin Wall, creating powers that will restrict mobility to a degree not seen since Communism dominated eastern Europe.

“Throughout the many decades of the 20th century’s Cold War, the freedom of movement Americans enjoyed as a cherished right was one of our secret weapons. As the Communists in Moscow promised the world utopia out of the barrel of a gun, people around the globe noticed that the Soviets needed walls and barbed wire fences to keep their people in, while in the US walls were as pointless as a fish’s bicycle.”

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was renowned for setting up a system of ‘internal passports’ that restricted citizens from leaving their area of residence without government permission.

“There remain few things more prized than American citizenship. Yet now our ever-expanding leviathan of a government is forcing Americans abroad out, and it might soon build its own Berlin Wall, restricting our “freedom of world travel,” as Reagan put it, even when there is no conviction from a court,” states the editorial, making the connection with the recent revelation that Americans are renouncing their citizenship in record numbers due to intensified efforts by the feds to pry into their financial affairs.

But it’s not just the IRS provision that has prompted a frosty response to a bill that looked set to sail through with barely a whimper of protest — anti-privacy measures are also coming under scrutiny.

“Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, reading through Section 31406 of the ‘Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act’ bill that’s currently making its way through Congress, made a nice catch: The bill calls for ‘Mandatory Event Data Recorders’ to be installed in new vehicles starting in the year 2015,” writes Megan Garber, of The Atlantic, one of a number of publications to report on the enforcement of mandatory black boxes, a story that we first highlighted on Wednesday.

While some writers scoff at the privacy implications of “event data recorders,” pointing out that they are already installed in the majority of new vehicles, they overlook the fact that making these black boxes mandatory is the first step to a tax by the mile system that has been the goal of the Obama administration for years.

However, the most chilling section of the MAP-21 bill is also the provision that’s attracted the least attention – the deployment of a ‘vehicle to infrastructure’ communication system – in other words a two-way bug that will connect your car to the ‘Internet of things’ – a transformation recently hailed by CIA chief David Petraeus as a boon for “clandestine tradecraft.”

This coincides with the development of street lights that are wirelessly connected to the Internet and double as “Homeland Security” surveillance hubs that can spot suspicious activity and record private conversations.

This kind of technology only existed in Stalin’s wildest dreams, and yet it is about to be mandated in all new vehicles within a few years unless simmering discontent over the MAP-21 bill is raised to a crescendo.

© 2012 Infowars.com